STRUCTURE DESIGN AND STABILITY ANALYSIS OF A LARGE WELDED STEEL SILO FOR COAL STORAGE

As the steel silo has incomparable advantages over the concrete silo，it is widely used in many fields， however，its theoretical research is relatively lagging behind，and especially there is no any clear specification to guide the design of a larger steel silo for coal storage． Based on the site operating conditions and technological requirements，the structure arrangement and the structure’s form of a proposed steel silo for coal storage were analyzed． The entire model assembled with the silo body and the roof was built up with FEA software Midas /Gen， and its static performance was analyzed，the features of the stress distribution and deformation distribution under different loads were got，and the rationality of the structure arrangement and its security were also verified． Eigenvalue buckling analysis on both empty silo and full silo were carried out with FEA software ANSYS，showing that the first order buckling eigenvalue of the full silo was decreased by 86. 85%． The influence of the ring pressure， produced by the coal，on improving the ultimate bearing capacity was also studied，and it was found that the first order buckling eigenvalue was increased by 89. 15% when considering the ring pressure． Finally a non-linear analysis was carried out，based on both the material nonlinearity and the geometry nonlinearity，obtaining the actual ultimate bearing capacity of the silo structure，finding that the steel plate silo is a kind of nonlinear structure．